C. Y. O’Connor

Broadcast 6.30pm on 18/10/2004

C.Y. O'Connor was one of Australia's greatest engineers. His spectacular achievement was to pump water six hundred kilometres to Kalgoorlie. The massive pipeline is still the lifeline to the West Australian Goldfields. Biographer Tony Evans says, "Many people at the time thought it was complete madness. It was the most expensive project in the Commonwealth, twenty one and a half million pounds!"

GEORGE NEGUS: Anyway, moving right along. Like Charles Sturt, our next historical obsessive thought he had the answers to Australia's extremely dry interior - a lot drier than where we are right now - except that he just might have been right.

TONY EVANS, AUTHOR: Many people at the time thought it was complete madness. It was the most expensive project in the Commonwealth. It eventually cost him his life. It would be the longest pipeline in the world, uphill - never been done anywhere in the world before. O'Connor was one of the great engineers of the Victorian era. He designed the Mundaring Weir to trap water to pump to Kalgoorlie. In those days there was no Green Party to insist upon ecological inquiries and so on, and it was all done in five years. O'Connor, like all geniuses, was a bit difficult to work with. He knew his subject so thoroughly, he was very confident. He didn't like red tape and he cut corners and this resulted in him making enemies. He had the most terrible criticism in Parliament - wounding criticism, ignorant criticism - and, of course, this got to him in the end. And although O'Connor might have been very difficult in many ways to work with - very exacting and very strict - he was also very considerate of his work force. If you see Mundaring pumping house today, it's a very beautiful building and it would have been a pleasant environment to work in. Steam pumps pumped the water in sections uphill until Coolgardie, and then, of course, from Coolgardie down to Kalgoorlie was downhill - the water just flowed downhill at the end.

He was accused of getting kickbacks. There were enormous contracts. The newspapers immediately thought that O'Connor was lining his own pocket. He wasn't. There were stories in the 'Sunday Times' about the dam wall possibly breaking and the whole of Perth being flooded with water. The poor man really was literally driven to his grave. The popular story that has been taught in schools for many years is that he committed suicide because the water didn't come through when he said it would and that the pipeline was a failure. But that's not true at all, of course. He knew exactly how long the water would take to get through. He knew. And the pipeline was working perfectly. The day in 1902, he rode out on the sands south of Fremantle and he shot himself. One of the tragic details that comes out of that in the inquest was that he took his teeth out and put them in his pocket before he shot himself.

After O'Connor's death, there the water came through at Mount Charlotte Reservoir in Kalgoorlie. There was great fanfare. But, of course, one person was missing from the grand photographs at the time, and that was the engineer and chief.

DIANA FRYLINCK, NATIONAL TRUST: Sir John Forrest was actually quoting the bible when he opened the scheme. He said, "We have made a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert." 100,000 people and 6 million sheep rely on the pipeline.

TONY EVANS: Not only has Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie benefited, but all the towns, all the farms along the pipeline. And it's just expanded and expanded, and to the present day. C.Y. O'CONNOR: "The Coolgardie scheme is alright and I could finish it if I got the chance and protection from misrepresentation, but there's no hope of that now."

TONY EVANS: He was one of Australia's great engineers. He deserves to be recognised, really, as one of the great historical figures in Australia as a whole.

GEORGE NEGUS: C.Y. O'Connor - without him and his pipeline, it's highly unlikely that dry old Kalgoorlie would exist today. Still to come, eccentric and outspoken author Xavier Herbert, who lived for a long while a couple of hours from here down the road in Cairns.

FRANCES DE GROEN, HERBERT'S BIOGRAPHER: Both his major works were intensely critical of the devastation that white settlement had caused both to the Indigenous community and to the land itself.